Getting Castaneda

*** Warning Magic Sex Violence Trigger Warning***

A strange consuming happiness in that whatever he is doing may very well be his last act on earth - Don Juan

"He decided to go to Pablito’s house first. Pablito, his co-apprentice, had been with him on the plateau that day in 1973. Whatever happened there, they had been together. Arriving about noon, he drove all the way around the village to avoid being seen. Something was different, though. The footpath was widened to a road now; he could drive right up to the front yard. The house had a new façade and a huge dog sitting in front. Pablito’s mother, dona Soledad, burst out the door.

They had nicknamed her ‘Mrs Pyramid’in honor of her big backside and pointed head. But now she was suddenly thin and shapely, and looked twenty years younger! She greeted him directly, then put her fists on her hips and stood facing him, showing herself to him, exuding the power of a young girl, with a gleam in her eye. She boldly put her arm through his; he felt her breast push against him as they walked from his car. She told him that Pablito had gone away for a few days.

When he asked about don Juan, she said he was gone forever and would never come back. She said don Juan gave her instructions for when Castaneda returned; she told him to come to her room. Castaneda was freaking out and wanted to leave, but he followed Soledad into the room. ‘You and I are the same,’she said, and sat on the edge of the bed. When he didn’t respond, she stood up, dropped her skirt, and caressed her pubic area. ‘You and I are one here! You know what to do!’Despite his alarm, Castaneda was incapable of looking away and admired her new, youthful body.

He decided he’d better just get out of there, so he made some apologies and went to his car. He opened the trunk to unload some gifts he meant to drop off. As he leaned in, he felt a huge furry hand grip the back of his neck. He screamed and fell to the ground. Dona Soledad was a few feet away, shrugging her shoulders with an apologetic half-smile. Castaneda wondered how he could be so stupid to once again come to Mexico and let himself fall into ‘a bottomless pit’. She lurched and clawed at him, with clenched teeth. He kicked her, then threw himself over the car, but she grabbed his foot. They fell to the ground. The enormous dog joined the fight.

Castaneda ran inside and bolted the door; he heard the dog mauling the screaming dona Soledad. He suddenly realized what a stupid move he’d just made, as if he were ‘running away from an ordinary opponent who could be shut out by simply closing a door’. Now he was locked in the house while the witch and her hound were between him and his car! He let Soledad into the house, bleeding and torn and screaming about what ‘that son of a bitch dog’had done to her.

He made a dash for the car. He got into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and threw it into reverse. He turned to look over his shoulder, and came face to face with the dog, snapping and drooling. He barely escaped to the roof of the car again. He slid around, trying to lure the animal out of one door so he could jump in through the other.

Soledad was watching from the house, laughing, naked above the waist. Castaneda managed to pause at this moment and noticed her breasts ‘shaking with the convulsions of her laughter’. He was known as a ladies’man, and she was playing him. He went back into the house.

Dona Soledad argued that it was hopeless for him to try to escape, just as it was for her to try to hold him there. The two of them were brought together for a purpose and neither could leave until it was finished. To calm him, she promised to explain herself truthfully and answer honestly anything he asked. In her room, Castaneda took out his notepad and wrote.

She gave him her full life story and her history with don Juan. He asked about the other apprentices, male and female, who they were, and what they thought of him. This went on for five or six hours, until it got too dark to take notes. As night fell, she prepared two warm tubs of scented water and they each washed up. The bath made him feel numb and tingly. Next thing, he was lying on top of her. He knew he was in danger, yet something was holding him there.

Castaneda recalled don Juan telling him that ‘our great enemy is the fact that we never believe what is happening to us’. He slowly realized dona Soledad had wrapped her hair band around his neck and was choking him ‘with great force and expertise’."  (....)

"It’s also impossible to confirm the stories Castaneda tells of don Juan and the great sorcerers of ancient Mexico, or the tales of his contemporary cohorts. While they may or may not be true, a great storyteller can convey important historical and religious truths telling stories. It’s not easy to clearly define or even name the ancient religion Castaneda depicts in his books. By the time our current major religions started, it was already long past its prime. But themes from it still reverberate in many places today. It is the religion whose last remnant believers and practitioners were still sought out and destroyed by the Inquisition of Christianity only several centuries ago.

Belief in this same tradition of magic and witchcraft, though officially banned almost everywhere now, still persists in almost all non-urban areas in the world. The other night, in Indonesia where I live, my six-week-old son, Alex, woke up screaming. We calmed him down from his nightmare –it took several minutes to get him to stop flailing his arms angrily. Later, my Javanese mother-in-law calmly explained that Alex had been “pinched”by his guardian spirit. She had insisted we honor it by burying the placenta near our front gate. She says that when infants seem to smile or laugh at a private joke, and when they constantly gaze over your head instead of looking at you, they are watching and reacting to gestures from this spirit. In our popular culture, new epic legends of magic abound in books and films. Some are placed in an imagined European city or middle earth; some in a galaxy far, far away. With their dimensional scope, intricate plots, and exemplary heroes and villains, these modern epics entertain us by tickling the senses of our ancient heritages, unseen powers, and future possibilities.

Castaneda says that we have a powerful nostalgia for a long-past human era –an era of magic and sorcery that lasted much longer than our current rationalistic period. Humanity may have existed on earth for more than a million years; our current religions only appeared two to five thousand years ago. The age of reason only started 200 years ago. Reason has denied and buried the old beliefs, but they are a huge part of our heritage. Our rational consciousness is just the tip of our iceberg. We long for the remainder of ourselves, and for that lost era. There are things we left behind there which are worth rediscovering. For the most part, modern-day myths that dominate our bookstores and movie theatres don’t endeavour to explain how their magic could be possible. They don’t bother with metaphysics; they just use magic words or wands. Castaneda labored mightily to explain how and why don Juan’s magic worked. He described, in minute detail, an entire universe where magic is possible. He told us how it used to be, and could be, and dared us to prove or disprove it."
-- Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda UNDERSTANDING CARLOS CASTANEDA